Running SUGPK the Right Way — Launching Pakistan’s Sitecore User Group
Sitecore work in Pakistan has never been a small amount of work. It has been a small amount of shared surface. People building on XM, XP, Content Hub, Search, and now SitecoreAI have been learning it inside project teams, in vendor calls, and in global Slack channels where the useful answer arrives at an hour when Karachi is asleep. I wanted a local user group with a public calendar and a narrow habit: show the thing you actually configured, say which document you followed, and leave the recording of the session's outline on a URL that still resolves the week after. That group is SUGPK, the Sitecore User Group Pakistan, and the public site is sugpk.com.
I am writing this on 11 November 2026, a few days after the first session on that calendar. I am not going to turn the evening into a recap. I will not invent a headcount, a list of companies in the room, or a highlight reel of questions I did not write down at the time. The launch session is a fact on the site. The work of running the group is the sessions still in front of us, and the rules I want the group to keep while it is small enough to ruin by accident.
What is already on the calendar
The launch session is published at sugpk.com/events/sugpk-launch-sitecoreai-xm-cloud. It was scheduled for Saturday 7 November 2026, 7:00 to 9:00 in the evening, Asia/Karachi, and it was online. The subject was the one every local team is staring at this quarter: SitecoreAI and XM Cloud, what changed for people who already have a project, and what did not. That is the same split I have been writing about all month. A user group session is a better place for it than a status meeting, because nobody has to pretend their tenant matches the slide.
If you are reading this after the 7th, use that event page as the record of what we put on the calendar. I will keep the group's history on sugpk.com rather than in a blog post that goes stale. I would rather a page that can be corrected than a paragraph that named the wrong time and lived forever in a feed.
Two further sessions are already the point of this announcement. On Saturday 5 December 2026, SUGPK will run a Sitecore Search workshop. On Saturday 9 January 2027, we will run a Content SDK clinic. I am not attaching a clock time to either one in this post. Times belong on the event page, where they can be corrected if a speaker's evening changes, and I do not want two sources of truth by next week. The topics are the ones I will hold us to. December is Search: sources, attributes, a widget, and the questions-and-answers path only after a document is actually citable. January is Content SDK: a real app, a local editing host, and one migration pitfall reproduced on purpose. Both are online unless a future event page says otherwise. Pakistan is large, and an in-person evening in one city is a different event. We can do that when a host exists. We do not need it to start.
How I want a session to run
A SUGPK session is ninety minutes to two hours, because that is what the launch window was and because longer than that becomes a webinar nobody stays for. The first part is a walkthrough of a working configuration, not a tour of a product brochure. The person presenting shares a non-production tenant or a local head pointed at one, and they say the version. Content SDK 2.1 and Content SDK for Angular 1.0 are different talks. I do not want a slide that says "SDK" and a demo that is JSS from memory.
The second part is questions. I would rather cut a demo short than cut the questions, and I would rather leave a question unanswered than invent an API on stage. If we do not know, the follow-up is a link added to the event page: a doc, a repository, or a note that we asked Sitecore. That follow-up is the artifact. A user group that produces only a group photo has nothing for the developer who could not attend.
I am not going to pad the room with a panel of people who have not touched the feature. One prepared speaker and a moderator who will interrupt a sales pitch is enough. Vendor talks are welcome when they are labeled as vendor talks and when they still show a configuration. A roadmap slide with no documentation behind it gets introduced as a roadmap slide. Attendees can listen and decide. They should not leave thinking a click-path exists because a quarterly slide implied it.
We will announce sessions on sugpk.com/events and keep the list boring: date, topic, online or not, and the link to join. I will not announce a session only in a chat channel. Chat is how a reminder goes out. The site is how someone in Lahore or Islamabad finds the group six weeks later without knowing who to message.
What the first three topics are for
The launch topic, SitecoreAI and XM Cloud, is the orientation. Teams here are in the middle of the same conversation as everyone else: an organization that was XM Cloud, a head that may still be JSS, a Stream question from the XP estate that has not moved, and a manager who wants one migration budget. A local session can use local constraints, which include contractors who context-switch across all of those in a single week, and time zones that make a US-evening community call a poor default. The session does not replace Sitecore's documentation or the release notes. It gives people a place to say which page they followed and where it diverged from the tenant.
The December Search workshop is hands-on in the only sense that matters. Bring a source or be ready to watch one get created. We will talk about attributes, including a geo attribute for anyone whose site is a locator, and about why a generative answer is a separate request from a geo filter. I have written those up because I keep seeing the map get deleted. A workshop is where we put the filter back and read the document_id on the answer. If you do not have a Search subscription in the tenant you work on, come anyway and follow along. I would rather you see a real CEC screen than a diagram of one.
The January clinic is for teams stuck between JSS and Content SDK. We will open a starter, point it at an editing host, and break one thing on purpose: an environment variable still named the JSS way, or a component that still reads field.editable. Clinics go badly when the presenter has a perfect repo. They go well when the error on screen is an error the room recognizes. I will bring a broken branch.
None of these sessions require you to be an MVP, to work for a partner, or to have a slide of your own. If you want to present later, the bar I care about is that you did the work and you can show it. The community contribution guides Sitecore publishes, the ones that talk about user groups as a place to speak, are aimed at people who already have something to say. SUGPK should be a place where that talk can happen without a flight to a symposium.
What I will not do with the group
I will not publish attendance numbers I did not record, and I did not record them for the 7 November session in a form I am willing to print. A user group is not a lead list. I will not hand Sitecore, a sponsor, or a partner a roster of who joined the call. If we ever take registrations, the purpose will be to send the join link, and that list will stay boring and private.
I will not invent a chapter history. SUGPK's public calendar starts with the launch session above. If earlier informal chats happened between colleagues, they were not this group, and I will not rewrite them into a founding myth. I will not schedule a session we cannot staff. An empty event page with a date and no speaker is worse than a quiet month. December and January are on the calendar because the topics and the format are real. A month that has neither will be a month without a meetup, and the site can say so.
I will not let the group become a second support channel for a customer's production incident. Bring sanitized questions. Do not share a client secret, a production automation token, or a dump of someone else's content tree on a call. I have written elsewhere about how I file real product bugs. A user group is a good place to hear that other people hit the same doc mismatch. It is a bad place to paste the tenant id into chat.
I will not charge for the online sessions. If a cost ever exists, it will be a room and tea for an in-person evening, stated on the event page before anyone travels. The default is a browser tab.
How to take part
Come to the Search workshop on 5 December 2026, or to the Content SDK clinic on 9 January 2027. Read the event page for the time and the join link, and rely on sugpk.com/events if this post and the site ever disagree. The site wins.
If you want to show something in a later session, send a topic through the contact path on the site and include the product version you can demo. A twenty-minute showing of a Marketplace custom field, a Content Hub brand-kit mapping, or an Angular Content SDK editing host is more interesting than a keynote. I am particularly glad to see first-time speakers who have a working localhost and a nervous start. That is the whole group, including me, on a new feature.
If you are outside Pakistan and the time zone still works, you are welcome online. The group is for the people building Sitecore systems with this community. It is hosted with Pakistan's clocks because that is the gap I kept falling into, not because the topics are local-only. Search, Content SDK, and SitecoreAI are the same products everywhere. The evening they are discussed in Karachi has been the missing one.
The right way to run SUGPK is the dull way. A page with the date. A demo of the thing we said we would demo. Questions we are willing to leave open. Another page for the next date. The launch session was 7 November. I will see you in December for Search, and in January for Content SDK.